Quantum-Si Incorporated Class A Common Stock H.C. Wainwright 28th Annual Global Investment Conference

Yeah. I think success over the next 12 to 18 months really is underpinned mostly by the completion of the development of the Proteus platform, and the subsequent commercial launch, and then obviously the uptake on the backside of that. Platinum, as you mentioned in the opening remarks, has really been used, especially in the last sort of 24 months, as a market development tool. I think it continues to provide us opportunities to get people an early sort of flavor of the technology in their lab, as a way to sort of onboard them into protein sequencing and ultimately into what we think we'll deliver with Proteus. I think success is that launch, success is commercial adoption.

Then I think what else could sort of come from that, partnerships and other things we may be able to do with that platform in the market would be sort of the additional upside in that timeframe.

Sure. Proteomics is not new. It's been around for decades, predominantly through things called immunoassays, right? You have an antibody that you want to bind to a particular substrate, maybe an antigen to bind to a complex, typically looking for just a parent protein or single sort of thing to detect. Mass spec has been, I think, really should be credited with a lot of the growth in proteomics over the last, call it 10 to 20 years. There, you chop the protein up into smaller pieces. Those are thrown inside a mass spec, and you measure the mass, and you can sort of say something about the individual small pieces called peptides. Single molecule protein sequencing means literally those same peptides, but they're bound into a well, and you're able to detect, one at a time, each individual amino acid.

You can see that sequence in order, you can see small modifications to that sequence in order, much more akin to what many of us know as DNA sequencing, except in this case, the alphabet's 20 letters and you're reading the sequence of a protein. What people are excited about with the technology, one is getting a complete sequence of a protein, rather than sort of inferring that from fragments. The ability to measure those small modifications called post-translational modifications. With sequencing, the concept of being able to work reference-free, so without having to know what's in the sample. Mass spec is a great tool, but you need to know what that reference database is. What do you think is in that sample?

I think those are maybe broad strokes, the things people are really interested in doing with sequencing that's not necessarily accessible today with current technology.

Sure. If we take one step back, in 2025, we had built some prototypes of the machine, and those prototypes are not complete in terms of having every single component of the final instrument integrated. Based on those prototypes, we had shown some sequencing data at our Analyst Day in November of 2025 that showed that our sequencing chemistry that was on the first gen technology could be ported over, worked effectively on the prototypes. We then went into an integrated cycle, so bring all of that together with the liquid handling automation. The first thing to say is, it sequences. We don't have any machines that have ever shown up that just don't work. We don't have that sort of what I would call a fundamental technology challenge.

What we saw in the integrated units was, some instruments came in and have performed at the level we would expect in terms of various metrics we look at. Others, while they were sequencing well, they weren't at that same level. They were a little bit lower. Again, none of them were not functioning, and we weren't seeing wild variation in machines. It really felt to us like this was about just improving the repeatability. It was about getting the right specifications and tests in place in manufacturing to ensure that every unit coming off the line performs the same way. When you look at these things, there are two options that we considered.

One option is go from the current version straight to what people might call a pre-production or a production unit, depending on the lingo people use, or add another cycle in there, digest all of the changes and improvements in the end-of-line testing, get confidence in that, and then move to the production stage. We weighed those two and decided the extra cycle made the most sense. It de-risked things. It gives us higher confidence that before we take on that big expense of going into production, everything is working the way we want. In parallel, though, I mean, you're still working with those existing units, continuing to improve the performance through other aspects of the technology, including the chemistry and the software and algorithms. We're definitely not stuck. We're just adding that cycle to de-risk the step rather than jumping straight to production.